Southern Water Drop-In
PAUL MCLAUGHLIN
Southern Water will host a “Your Water Matters” drop-in event at the Stade Hall on Wednesday 4 November, giving residents a chance to ask questions and learn about “the work, improvements and investments” being made in Hastings and the surrounding area. The Stade Hall event will run from 1:30 to 6:00pm and residents can drop in at any time during those hours.
The event will give the privatised water company the opportunity to point to its record investment to improve the resilience of the network, with over £8 million spent on refurbishing a sewage transfer pipe through Bulverhythe and more than £4 million in pumping station upgrades and sewer lining work to address infiltration and misconnections.
Southern Water’s recent operational history in the town reads as a catalogue of failure, however, and the company will have to work hard to convince residents that the drop-in is little more than a PR exercise. The string of failures includes the flooding of the town centre, outages that led people to fear they would have no water last Christmas, and a major water outage in May 2024, which left 30,000 people without running water for more than five days – when bottled water was promised but not delivered, water stations were insufficient, and traffic gridlocked across the town. The water outage was so bad that staff at the White Rock Hotel were even forced to fill buckets from the sea to flush toilets.
Sewage pollution has also been a persistent problem. Southern Water has discharged raw sewage into the sea off Hastings and St Leonards on multiple occasions, including a release from the Pelham overflow in August this year after 60 days of near drought conditions , and last November millions of plastic bio-beads were released into the sea from the company’s Eastbourne Wastewater Treatment Works after a screening filter failed during heavy rainfall.
Southern Water insists that it is listening to local concerns. The company will hope that direct engagement with residents will help them to feel more positive about their efforts to improve the infrastructure and water quality across the town.
For a community that has endured dry taps, flooded streets and sewage on beaches, however, it is likely to take more than a drop-in to flush away local scepticism.
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply